Guest editorial: automated techniques for migrating to the cloud (II)

Abstract

The ever-growing popularity of cloud computing platforms provides hybrid architectures and dynamic intelligence for tomorrow’s complex software applications. The “hybrid cloud” has emerged as an exciting new paradigm that includes private cloud, public cloud and community cloud infrastructure to provide IT services anytime and anywhere. It has recently also raised relevant interest in both the academic and the industrial research communities as a very promising application field for intelligent cloud computing and services. The interest in hybrid cloud environments has also been shown by many industrial and standardization efforts accomplished in the last years. Both academy and industry widely recognize the crucial role of software automation to facilitate the development of efficient and intelligent cloud services, by reducing implementation and deployment costs and time to market. This two-part special issue is in response to the increasing convergence between automated software technologies and cloud computing; and the challenges and opportunities in this context. The second part of this special issue of Automated Software Engineering (ASE) covers different aspects of the problem, both from the theoretical to practical side. After a large open call, which received over two dozen submissions, an international editorial committee selected eight high quality research papers for publication. Each paper was reviewed by at least three expert reviewers. Many papers underwent several rounds of review before final acceptance. The research papers selected for this special issue represent key recent progress in the field. They include work on cloud architectures, service extraction, composition and deployment, big data intelligence, cloud databases, performance benchmarking, resource allocation and monitoring. All of these papers not only provide novel ideas and state-of-the-art techniques in the field, but also stimulate future research in the sustainable environment.